Personal Posts by Gaelen Gates

The hardest part about being a senior-level lawyer (especially at a public company) is that sometimes I am expending all of my time and sanity on something and I can’t talk about it. Sometimes it involves doing weird things like flying to Tulsa, Oklahoma on short notice to look through a box of paper documents, and I just have to say that I’m “traveling on business” without further explanation.

But now I can finally talk about it! This is a bit delayed because we signed the deal and then I immediately got COVID. But I spent the past 3 months leading this deal, in which we have signed an agreement to buy one of our bank partners for $590M in cash. It’s a huge professional accomplishment for me, and the first merger of this size that I’ve negotiated since Checkr’s acquisition of Inflection 4 years ago.

It was stressful, but challenging, and I learned a lot. Now we move to the phase of applying for regulatory approval from the OCC and Federal Reserve, which I will be participating in but not leading. It’s nice to get back to doing my actual job and having my weekends free.

Anyway, if you are one of the people who have wondered where I disappeared to for the last 3 months, now you know.

Yesterday, I was at the Nasdaq for the first day of trading for my company, Chime Financial. It was truly a surreal moment. After a hectic day of working in the NYC Chime office Wednesday, finishing out all the final legal tasks like the bring-down diligence call and the pricing discussion with the Board (we ended up pricing above our $24-26 range, at $27), we arrived at the Nasdaq Marketsite at 7:45am. There was a green carpet rolled out for our entrance, and a decorated reception area with breakfast. Our ticker symbol, CHYM, was everywhere. I still resent the fact that the ticker CHME was taken by another company (it was my first choice)! There, we chatted and got an overview of how the morning was going to go.

First up, we headed into the television studio for the bell-ringing ceremony (although at Nasdaq, it’s actually just pushing a button). Because it’s live, we did a rehearsal, with our founders, their families, the executive team, and our board all joining our founders on the podium in stages.

Then it was time to actually push the button to kick off the trading day!

After that, we went outside to take pictures in Times Square and see our ticker on all the billboards.

Everyone at Chime had a chance to upload a photo in advance, each of which was shown on the billboards for a few seconds each. Here is me!

We were ready to get back inside to the air conditioning (the high was 89 degrees that day)! We headed up to the room where the person who is matching up buyers and sellers was lining up the first trades. I didn’t realize this was the process, and takes a few hours. He walked us through what was happening on his multiple screens.

While waiting, our CEO and other execs did interviews. I was in the background of this interview on CNBC!

Ultimately, the process was complete and we started trading at $43! Cheers all around, and the show was over. We were all exhausted and emotionally drained, and had several hours before the reception that night. Personally, I took the subway to the north edge of Central Park and took a slow walk back to the hotel (about 4.5 miles). It was very relaxing.

Then it was back downtown (I stayed in midtown) for our reception at Cipriani Wall Street. It was so fun to celebrate together!

Our DJ was Rev. Run of Run-DMC! He was great and got everybody dancing (even me!) with 80s and 90s hits.

Finally, I got back to the hotel and crashed.

I said in the title that this was an 11-year journey for me. Ever since I took my first in-house job at Credit Karma in 2014, I’ve been working at a company that was planning to go public “some time next year.” At CK, we got acquired by Intuit. Then I went to Checkr, which remains a private company. As a corporate lawyer, I knew that taking my company through an IPO was going to be a career highlight… and now I have finally gotten to do it. The best part is that I love my team at Chime, and know that this is an exciting beginning for the company. I can’t wait to see what we do next!